In Her Room at the Prow of the House Where Light Breaks, and the Windows Are Tossed with Linden, My Daughter Is Writing a Story

These are the strangest days of my life, and that's before this coming week, the strangest week ever, at the end of which I leave my daughter at college in Ohio. I've more to think about than I have to say, about everything mark and kayfabe, but especially this coming week and the milestone this coming Sunday which is not kayfabe, or what parts of it are are given lovingly without mark.

I'm incapable of not posting - and believe me, that's being not so much reevaluated as confronted before the reevaluation - so, expect what you expect, just more and less so, and maybe even more maudlin.

• Daily Gaddis: - Like you say, my boy, it isn't that simple. Do you think they want to know? Recktall Brown did not take out his penknife, nor even look for it in the pockets swung against his body, where it was a familiar tenant. He bit off the end of his cigar, and began to pace before the fireplace. - Eminent scientists agree, after exhaustive tests, that a fifteen-cents-a-gallon chemical in a fancy bottle with a lot of scientific words on it is proven superior. So they pay a dollar a bottle because they want to. These pictures of yours, do you think you could get two hundred dollars for one? No. But these poor bastards crawl all over each other trying to get them away from me for prices in the thousands. They don't know, they don't want to know. They want to be told. This guy who picture you print with a stethoscope in his hand, he's the same as your half-assed authorities. They want credit for discovering one of these old pictures. So just like the people who are proud to pay a dollar a bottle for this chemical, the same God damn people are proud they can hire an eminent authority to tell them what they ought to buy for art.
• An era in ideas.
• Die in our dread.
• Deindividuation and pseudonymity.
• Say Podhoretz profoundly believes this. How do you reason with this fuck?
• Nine rich white men.
• Barack O'Hoover.
• Schmevidence.
• Marx was right?
• Inequality leads to violence.
• Democratic Party.
• Primitive accumulation.
• Will Camden be Philly's Tottenham?
• Just a spark away.
• The competing common senses of the riots.
• English riots, right-wing stupidity, liberalism. 
• Crackers and the riots.
• Everybody agrees: looting is wrong.
• Why is Sean Hannity mad you're having sex?
• On Juan Cole's war on anarchism. Hey, bmpthnx!
• The good takedown of the Second Shittiest Human in the World (and a damn fine takedown of FMFML too) I've yet seen: By “extremely tough,” Rubin means that Santorum routinely exaggerates foreign threats, and then demagogues the threats he has exaggerated in the most alarmist fashion possible.
• What went wrong for Fuckface? 
• He wasn't cracker enough, that's what.
• Oops.
• On punctuation.
• A Little Tooth.
• Father's Song.
• Too many constituencies?
• So much noise.
• Sillliman's always generous lit-links.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Hours.
• Woke up with this in my head:

THE WRITER

Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back, 
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.